


it might be over soon

by sparxwrites



Series: 22, A Million [1]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Haircuts, Mutual Pining, Past Child Abuse, Pre-Slash, Tenderness, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-24
Updated: 2019-11-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:01:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21546496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparxwrites/pseuds/sparxwrites
Summary: Beau comes to Jester the evening after they leave the Lionett estate, shears in hand. “Cut my hair?” she asks, holding them out in front of her like an offering. She doesn’t meet Jester’s eyes.(In which Jester cuts Beau's hair, and it's not really about the hair. Not really.)
Relationships: Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett
Series: 22, A Million [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2147964
Comments: 30
Kudos: 199





	it might be over soon

Beau comes to Jester the evening after they leave the Lionett estate, shears in hand. “Cut my hair?” she asks, holding them out in front of her like an offering. She doesn’t meet Jester’s eyes.

Insects call in the fading light, keeping the scene from silence, and Jester wishes briefly she had the power to quiet them. There’s an odd note to Beau’s voice – set, determined, a sharp edge of _don’t ask don’t **fucking** ask_ – that she can’t quite decipher over the buzzing hum.

“I’ve never cut hair before,” she says, instead, reaching out to touch the cold iron. Hesitant, in a way she never is, because this feels– _big_ , somehow. “Maybe you should ask Y–” The name dies on her lips, bitten back before it can escape and make them both flinch from the gaping absence that still haunts their family. “–one of the others.”

“I’m asking _you_.” Beau flips their hands, presses the shears into Jester’s palm, and curls Jester’s fingers shut around them. Then she flops to the ground, graceful even in her gracelessness, splay-legged and head tipped back to stare at the sun kissing the horizon through the trees. “Doesn’t matter, anyways. I wanna cut it all off. That’s easy enough, right? Pretty hard to fuck up.”

Jester blinks in surprise. “You mean bald?” she asks, sinking down after Beau, settling behind her, skirt fanning out across the damp grass. “Like Dairon’s? I think you need a knife for that, and some soap, and… things. Maybe Caleb has some, for shaving– but, oh no, what if I cut your head–?”

It smells like rain, down here in the grass, though the storm has long since passed – like gathering clouds, and compost, and the slowly-fading sweat-stress stink that’s clung to Beau like a second skin ever since they arrived at her parents’.

“Nah.” Beau waves a hand, reaching up with the other to tug the leather thong around her topknot loose. Her hair spills down her neck, her shoulders, a wave of warm, sun-streaked brown. “Not like that. Just–” She rubs a hand just above her nape, scraping nails across the short stubble of her undercut. It’s cropped a quarter-inch close to her skull, done fresh before they reached the Estate. Like polishing plate armour, Jester had thought at the time. Like hammering the dents out, in preparation for battle. “All the same length, y’know?”

For a second, Jester wars with the urge to reach out and touch, bury her hands in the softness, lean in and press her face–

She gives in, just a little, reaching out to card fingers through Beau’s hair. They’re all in want of a bath, and it shows, but the hair is soft and fine against her palms nonetheless. She smells sandalwood and smoke, and just the faintest hint of lavender – the ghost of Mollymauk haunting them even now, in the tiniest of the ways he touched their lives.

Her heart clenches, her fingers too, and the edges of the shears dig lines into her palms.

She doesn’t ask questions, though – and, though she doesn’t know it, Beau loves her for it, momentarily and _fiercely_. Instead, she says,, “So just… cut it _all_ off, like, _snip snip snip_! Right?” as she slips her fingers free of Beau’s hair and uncurls her hand from around the shears, eases the blunt pain of them against tender skin.

Beau hears but cannot see them, the shears, the faint _shhk_ of metal against metal as Jester closes and opens them experimentally.

“Yeah. _Yeah_ ,” she says, and closes her eyes.

The first cut is the worst. It nearly makes her flinch – the tug on her hair, the close of the shears, the sudden lightness. For a moment, her chest tightens, and something enormous and black and _terrified_ rises in her chest, thorny vines curling around her throat and _choking_ –

“It’s like shearing a sheep!” says Jester, delightedly, as the first long coils of hair fall into her petticoats. “Hey, do you wonder if Caduceus ever has to do this, but like… _everywhere_? Like, even on his _butt_ and stuff?”

The moment passes. The darkness subsides, beaten back by the glow of Jester’s unconscious light. Beau falls, just a little bit, further in love.

She doesn’t say that, though. “Gods, I don’t– I don’t wanna think about Caduceus shaving his butt right now, Jester,” she says, instead, eyes still closed, throat tight. Behind her, Jester falls into peals of cackling laughter, and the shears _shhk shhk shhk_ their way through the remaining longness of her hair.

They sit like that, for a while, as Beau’s hair parts from her scalp, clip by steady clip of the shears. It’s surprisingly cold, without it, with the early evening chill creeping through to her suddenly-unprotected scalp.

It makes her feel naked, though there’s still a layer of fuzz there, thick and stubbly. Makes her feel _vulnerable_ , in a nauseous sort of way that claws up her throat and hammers at her teeth, demanding to get out.

“My mom used to love my hair,” she says, abruptly. She doesn’t open her eyes. “When I was younger, I mean. She used to plait it, or pin it up in these elaborate, like, curls, or twists…”

Behind her, the steady rhythm of the clippers falters, pauses. The wind catches on her newly-shorn fuzz, and she shudders, trembling like a lamb newly-born until it passes.

She inhales. Exhales. “That was the only time she’d touch me, really. For like– months at a time, sometimes. Just… doing my hair.” Inhale, exhale, spine straight, shoulders down, _don’t hunch don’t hide don’t **fucking**_ _cry_. “I used to fuck it up, sometimes. My hair, I mean. On purpose. Not ‘cos I hated it– or, I _did_ , I fuckin’ hated those stupid pins she used, but, just… just so she’d…”

The words stick in her throat, vulnerable and naked in a way she’s not sure she can put a voice to yet. In a way she’s not sure she _needs_ to voice, for Jester to hear.

The shears snick open again, closed. Open again. Beau breathes in time with them, meditational.

“Well,” says Jester, quiet, but with feeling. With _venom_. “ _I_ think your parents can go _fuck_ themselves.”

Beau isn’t sure she’s ever she’s ever heard Jester sound venomous before. It loosens a knot around her heart, a binding she hadn’t even realised was there, and she breathes a little easier with it gone. Breathes in a way she hasn’t for _weeks_ , with the shadow of her parents and their house looming over her no matter where in Kamordah she tried to hide from it.

The shears close. Open again. Don’t close again.

Beau exhales. Inhales. Opens her eyes, reborn, naked and new under the rhythmic slice of metal against metal.

“It’s a little patchy, I think,” says Jester, apologetically, as Beau reaches up to feel her new hair. “You’ve got a little– oh! You’ve got a _tuft_! It’s _very_ cute, but probably– move your fingers–” She chivvies Beau’s hand away, snips at the particularly unruly patch until it meets her satisfaction. “There. _Now_ it’s done.”

“How does it look?” asks Beau, letting her fingers creep back up – run from her nape to her forehead, ear to ear, rubbing curiously at the line of stubbly fuzz just above her forehead. Her scalp’s colder, like this, the texture and shape of her head alien under her fingers.

She grins. _Reborn_.

Jester hums, thoughtfully, wiping the last few hairs off the shears and onto her skirt. She’s got a lapful of Beau’s hair, anyway, long inches of chestnut-brown fallen in shorn curls across the dark green and blue. “You look… like you,” she says, truthfully, and feels the rightness of it even as she speaks it. “It– it suits you.”

“Yeah,” says Beau, still grinning, scrubbing at her scalp with both palms. There’s a fine fuzz of cut hair tickling the back of her neck, fallen down her shirt to prickle her spine, itching at her head. “ _Yeah,_ I fuckin’ _do_.” She turns, still grinning, teeth bared. “Thanks, Jes’. I owe you one.”

Backlit by the sunset, the fine chestnut of her buzzcut set aflame by the dying light, Beau looks like something fierce, radiant. Something _holy_ , haloed in sun and bright with the wild kind of joy that only comes from finding freedom _._

Jester’s breath catches. Her heart stutters, for a beat, skipping out of time. “No problem!” She grins, forced, because all she wants to do is _stare_ , and she doesn’t know why. “It’s cool. No problem. Any time,” she says, and _means_ it. “ _Any_ time.”

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote something that doesn't require archive warnings!! aren't yall proud of me? ...anyways, title is from "[22 (OVER S∞∞N)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJyNFOiECqk)" by bon iver, which was the backing track to writing this fic. the whole album (22, A Million) has weirdly become my beau/jester playlist, for reasons incomprehensible even to me.
> 
> as always, you can find me (and more content, of dubious quality) over @ sparxwrites on tumblr.


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